


from the rhythm of a younger heart

by wasd



Category: Buzz (Korea Band), 아는 형님 | Knowing Bros | Ask Us Anything
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Reality, Kid Fic, M/M, Melodrama, Notfic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-27
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-08-08 17:50:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16434041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wasd/pseuds/wasd
Summary: When Kyunghoon was 22, he fell in love, got married, ran away from home, was kicked out of his band, was sued by his agency, and became a dad, in that order.At least three of those things were his fault.(not!fic about kyunghoon the single dad)





	1. they say love is a virtue, don't they?

**Author's Note:**

> a lot of what i write blatantly caters to my id, but this one takes the cake. here there be sex before feelings, dudes crying, skin hunger, unnecessary self-sacrifice, having too many feelings and yet being incredibly bad at them, and the price of fame. uh, enjoy?
> 
> content note: in one scene, there is a non-graphic description of a panic attack.
> 
> title from bleachers - like a river runs.

When Kyunghoon was 22, he fell in love, got married, ran away from home, was kicked out of his band, was sued by his agency, and became a dad, in that order.

At least three of those things were his fault.

( _Selfish,_ was what Yejun had called him. It stung, because it was true, but it didn't hurt as much as the other members avoiding his eyes, not saying anything even when the agency had yelled and yelled and yelled—even when they knew that Kyunghoon would die for them, was dying for them, IV punctures dotting the back of his hand and the crook of his elbow—and when it ended all he had left was papers alleging breach of contract and death threats on his cyworld and a too-expensive flip phone in the bottom of the Han River.)

But he had Eun-ji, and later they had Eun-mi, Kyunghoon scrunched up in the hospital anteroom, with no one to talk to except for patients waiting for their own news, haggard and sleep-deprived, trying to ignore the sour stench of illness that hung over the place. It should have been the happiest day of his life. 

At the moment Eun-mi's chubby little fingers curled around his thumb, Kyunghoon knew that he couldn't regret what had happened to him, what he'd done. He scraped for every possible night-time part-time work that a high-school graduate with no useful life skills could get, so that he could tend to Eun-mi while Eun-ji went to her office in the mornings. They lived in a shabby-genteel building in a shabby-genteel part of Incheon, with retired aunties as neighbors who viewed perpetual scruffball Kyunghoon with suspicion but doted on pink-cheeked big-eyed Eun-ji when Kyunghoon took her to the park in the mornings. And they were happy, for a little while, until the draft notice came and there was nothing Kyunghoon could do, but come crawling back to his parents, begging them to take care of his wife and kid, because Eun-ji had no family left in Korea, and maybe his mom and dad couldn't forgive him, but surely the sins of the father were not the sins of his daughter. Eventually his parents said yes, and Kyunghoon's family moved back to Seoul, and Kyunghoon joined the army.

In his second year of service, Eun-ji visited and said, her company was giving her a promotion, a better-paying job that reflected how smart she was and how she worked, but she would have to go to Canada, to a city called Vancouver that Kyunghoon wouldn't be able to find even with a map. And she wanted to go— _of course you should go,_ he told her—but Kyunghoon couldn't go with her, because he could barely speak English, had hated the few times he'd been overseas with their unfamiliar food and smells and weather and the quality of light, and they fought, and cried, and fought, and by the time Kyunghoon was discharged from the army, he was 26, divorced, a single father, 20 kg underweight, and unemployed.

It was as far from being 21 and the vocalist of Korea's most popular flower rock band as he could possibly get.

He moved himself and Eun-mi out of his parents' house, found a tiny one-bedroom rental in a more shabby, less genteel part of Seoul, where his neighbors spent all day at the local jjimjilbang and all night drinking in pochangs the city officials hadn't managed yet to weed out. They were all older residents who listened to Cho Yung-Pil and Im Byung-soo and Joo Hyun-mi, and only talked about pop music to complain about the racket the modern youths made in the streets. He never made work friends, always excusing himself from work gatherings to take care of Eun-mi. The worst part of living there was the noraebang across the street, and no matter the time of day, Kyunghoon could hear the tinny plastic instrumental music from the machines inside. But Eun-mi had finally stopped asking where her mom was, was fitting in her new kindergarten, was bright and cheerful and creative and happy—together they learned to cook eggs in the morning, and went camping on Sundays, and at night, he would stroke her hair and sing her to sleep, lullabies the only songs he could bear singing without wanting to cut his tongue out. 

Kyunghoon poured everything good about himself into Eun-mi, and it didn't matter that he was hollow and nothing except for his love for her and her love for him.

One day, while on their customary Sunday visit to Eun-mi's doting grandparents, his mother took him aside and told him that one of his ex-members, the flat-faced leader who'd gifted his family dried persimmons in 2003 when Kyunghoon had signed the agency contract, had shown up at their doorstep. Had wanted to speak to him. 

Between Eun-ji, Eun-mi, the precarious cliff of poverty and the fear that someone was going to take his family away from a shitty father like himself, Kyunghoon hadn't had the time to see how far Buzz went without him. He didn't want to know, because in his heart of hearts he didn't know if he wanted them to fail, or succeed.

Reading his face, his mother said, "I told him not to come back," and Kyunghoon knew that she had forgiven him all his trespasses.

But even with his mother's love shielding him, once he became aware that Yejun-hyung was looking for him, Kyunghoon couldn't stop thinking about it, couldn't help but wonder why. He couldn't afford to go to a PC bang and look Buzz up, and even the thought of stepping into a music store to check out their discography (after him, without him) made him want to scream. The music industry moved swiftly, discarding yesterday's chart-topper for today's dazzling new star, but Kyunghoon couldn't ever forget how his career had crashed and burned, how quickly he'd become a pariah and outcast, the bridge to a promising future of stardom and fame burnt at his feet because— he'd been in love, and he deluded himself into thinking, _they'd be happy for me, right,_ and on both counts, he was proven wrong.

He thought about it while doing data entry, while picking up used delivery dishes from people's doorsteps, while cleaning windows and cars, and he thought and thought and thought so hard that he wasn't even surprised that Yejun showed up at the jokbal eatery where he was mopping floors just before closing time.

They had never been people who apologized to each other, not about the things that truly mattered beyond raucous play-fighting and fucking up during gigs, so the only reason why Kyunghoon didn't throw the mop at Yejun was Yejun bowing to him, as though Kyunghoon was older, and telling him, "I'm sorry for failing you." For that, Kyunghoon begrudgingly led him to the staff break room and made him tea.

He wanted to yell at Yejun, had spent years thinking of what he would have told them if given a chance, but as the seasons changed and he became more worn-down, the anger banked itself under the ashes of cold, cold, cold exhaustion. So Kyunghoon could only tell Yejun, in the end: "I don't care, Eun-mi is worth everything,"

—and Yejun nodded, "I know she is."

And that concession, it shouldn't mean much, because where was this five years ago when the agency had wanted to take every won Kyunghoon had earned for them to make him pay for being too not-single to be sold to fans, but it did and Kyunghoon buried his face in his arms and cried without tears, shaking the table underneath him. Yejun, who'd been at one point more of a big brother to him than Kyunghoon's actual older brother, knew well enough not to offer him comfort.

He and Yejun agreed to meet each other, once a month, on Friday afternoons when Eun-mi would be sleeping over at her best friend's house, at a tiny coffee shop—not the university district, Kyunghoon insisted, away, away from where anybody could conceivably recognize him—and after a solid six months of tentative catching up, Yejun walked in with Woohyun in tow and unannounced, and Kyunghoon got up from his seat and walked out. 

The road to healing was difficult. Slow, not unlike the year Buzz had spent travelling Korea, learning themselves and learning what being Buzz meant. Slow, because all of them still sported bruises like traps to skirt around. But better than fast, like their ascent, steep and beyond their control. He forgave them, and they forgave him, and discovered again what had made them so happy, being together, even when they were crammed in a too-small too-hot practice room, playing for hours and hours and hours and never feeling tired.

Kyunghoon heard their stories, the final concert that Buzz never staged, because Sunghee refused to sing Kyunghoon's songs, about Woohyun being the old-man junior in his platoon, about the tattoo artist who wrote indelible ink on Junki's arms and inside his heart, about Yejun tracking all of them down, always the leader, always responsible, too stubborn to let them go.

He told them his stories, of he and Eun-ji reconciling over stuttering Skype calls, coming to terms with realizing they married too young, too young to understand that love could only do so much, finding out that they were better off friends, and that Eun-ji was doing her best to be the best long-distance co-parent ever, and he told them all about Eun-mi, the way she could sit and color for hours, her scolding him when he tried to braid her hair, the little songs she would make up for the fruits and vegetables when they went to the supermarket, his unwavering belief that she was growing up to be the most amazing person in the country, a future president, CEO, a Nobel prize winner, despite having him for a father.

He celebrated his 30th birthday in his apartment, Eun-mi playing with the confetti stuck to his sweater, his parents and Woohyun and Sunghee unpacking food in his cramped kitchen, his brother and Yejun exchanging ahjussi medicine tips, and Junki, setting up the computer so that Eun-ji could greet him from Vancouver.

With a more solid support system, Kyunghoon managed to quit most of his part-time jobs, settling into a decent enough routine of taking Eun-mi to school, then delivering food for a fried chicken franchise, then picking Eun-mi up from school, then, when Eun-mi was staying the night with her grandparents or her friends, supplementing his income by picking up bar-back shifts at a nightclub.

The nightclub manager didn't let him go to the floor often, something about making the customers unhappy, but one night, a bunch of VIPs had shown up, and because the floor was severely understaffed, an executive decision was made to stuff him into a shiny jacket (name tag: Kim Byungman) and assist in booking for the plebes while the senior waiters fetched champagne and whiskey for the VIPs. Kyunghoon didn't really know how to do booking, but he was fairly sure it didn't usually involve the female patrons slipping napkins with numbers on them into his pocket, and male patrons glaring daggers at him should he approach their table with a tray full of beers. Deciding not to be involved in a brawl, Kyunghoon kept to the walls of the club, lighting cigarettes when asked and directing drunk clubbers to the bathrooms.

That's when he met Heechul.

Heechul—it was impossible not to know his name, his friends were very loud—was very obviously a VIP, with styled colored hair that probably cost as much as Kyunghoon's monthly rent, and a jacket that could have paid for Eun-mi's school fees, and he reeked of the imported beer the VIP tables kept buying, and he embodied the top two things Kyunghoon had abstained from ever since he became responsible for another human being: alcohol and sex.

Now Kyunghoon was a professional, could do his job adequately and without causing any trouble, but Heechul kept hitting on him, and Kyunghoon, like, ok, he's only a man, a man whose dick hadn't fallen off from disuse, and maybe this Heechul guy just had a working-class fetish, and Kyunghoon had always been easy for flattery and flirting, and oh jesus, could Heechul flatter. oh, could he _flirt_. Pretty soon they'd locked themselves in the VIP bathroom, grinding against each other, kissing sloppy and with too much teeth and spit, and Kyunghoon hadn't had sex since Eun-ji, so he came embarrassingly fast, and he'd hide his face in shame, except Heechul had stared at him and said, _can you go again,_ and well, Kyunghoon could. In fact, he could do Heechul one better, and dropped to his knees, and took Heechul's cock in his mouth. Kyunghoon was not an expert at this kind of thing (cocksucking, hook-ups, sex in a public bathroom, pick any, pick all), but he remembered what he liked, and applied himself to sucking this stranger's cock to the best of his ability—and it was a boost to his ego that, when he looked up through his eyelashes at Heechul, carefully licking the leaking slit, Heechul shuddered and came, then pulled him up and jacked him off again, sucking the taste of his own come off Kyunghoon's tongue.

Once they stumbled out of the bathroom, disheveled and fucked-out, Heechul's friends immediately swooped in, yelling excitedly about some DJ they knew playing at a club in Gangnam, and Kyunghoon was swept back, pushed to the edges of Heechul's crowd, invisible once again, and he let himself melt away into the darkness of the club, ducking his head and lurking in the storage room for the rest of the night. It was a cheap thrill—he was a cheap thrill—and besides, he hadn't even told Heechul his name; there was no point in being disappointed by an outcome he'd expected.

After his shift, he went home, and woke up the next day and called Eun-mi as his parents took her to school, and went to work, repressing the memory of Heechul's auburn hair, his wicked smile, the curiously soft way he brushed back Kyunghoon's hair even as he efficiently fucked his throat.

At the club, he went back to his usual position, clearing glasses and hauling cases of liquor from the stock room, and he was crouched underneath the bar, shoving bags of ice into coolers, when he heard the Ji-hye the bartender ask, "How can I help you, sir?" and he knew that voice, oh my god, Heechul replying, "I'm looking for one of your waiters, can you point me to him?"

Black spots danced in Kyunghoon's vision, his breath hitched, and he nearly plunged head-first into an open cooler. No way—was Heechul, was he here, was he looking for Kyunghoon? Glasses clattered as he grabbed at the nearest tray, the surge of panic making his entire body shake.

Ji-hye, bless her, didn't bat an eye at the racket Kyunghoon was making at her feet, calmly telling Heechul, "Sir, if it's about our employees, I can direct you to our manager."

"It's not, no, I mean, I'm not complaining, I'm not here to pick a fight, I just want to talk to him."

"What's his name, sir?"

There was a long silence. "...Kim Byungman?"

Under his hands, the rattling of glasses grew louder. He was on the verge of passing out when Ji-hye, attention ostensibly on Heechul, kicked him under the bar, and the new pain yanked him back from the brink. He shoved his face between his knees and thought desperately at Ji-hye, _make him go away. make him go away. leave me alone._

He couldn't hear Ji-hye and Heechul's back-and-forth over the buzzing in his ears, but eventually he felt Ji-hye's tentative touch on his shoulderblade, her soothing, "He left, you can stand up now," which was cold comfort to him. 

As weeks passed, Kyunghoon never saw the flash of auburn hair in the crowded club again, and he began to relax. _Guys like that got bored quick,_ he reassured himself. Then, one night, while he was sprawled in front of the TV, letting the chatter from the home shopping channel lull him into a doze, he got this unshakable feeling that there was something about the presenters—a boy group he faintly recognized, Kyunghoon was too tired to dredge up the murky memories from his past—that he couldn't quite put his finger on. The camera zoomed in on them, and that was how Kyunghoon found out that the Heechul that had not-quite-stalked him, the Heechul whose cock he sucked in a bathroom stall at his workplace, was the Super Junior member Kim Heechul, the singer of Rokkuko Kim Heechul, and Kyunghoon knew that the fine-spun threads that tethered his ramshackle castle of dreams to the sky were beginning to unravel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> promo time: sign-ups for [the flowers of spring, a heechul/kyunghoon fic exchange](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/kyungchulexchange2018/profile), are now open! please check it out if you're interested. sign-ups close on nov. 15, 23:59 utc :)


	2. didn't know i was lonely 'til i saw your face

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is three chapters now, @ me: i thought this was notfic?
> 
> content note: mean k-netz comments, but probably not on the level of actual mean knetz comments, which are an internet trashfire

Setting aside the aberration of Kyunghoon sucking a world-famous idol's cock in a public bathroom, his routine plodded along its usual drudgery of chicken orders and childcare, accepting weekend invitations to play ping-pong and bowling, and declining noraebang ( _no,_ he told Junki for the nth time and ignored his guilt and grief).

It was his last delivery today, to a fancier apartment complex than his usual route, and Kyunghoon was looking forward going home and testing a new recipe his mom passed on to teach Eun-mi to eat more mushrooms, that he practically bounded out of the elevator, nearly forgetting to keep his mask on his face as he pressed the doorbell.

He checked the delivery app as the door opened. "Mr. Kim?" he read out, then lifted his head and was abruptly struck by a bolt of recognition. 

"You're Mr. Kim?" he asked, at the same time Kim Heechul, the Kim Heechul, blurted out, "Min Kyunghoon?"

Kyunghoon didn't tell him his name. He was sure about that.

Fuck. Fuck. Shit. God fucking damn it. Fuck.

Heechul knew who he was.

Heechul had—known who he was, back at the club, in the bathroom, had seen his face and had pegged as the infamous ex-Buzz, ex-vocal, ex-celebrity, and who knows what else the tabloids and k-netz called him.

All of the movies that Kyunghoon had watched didn't prepare him for how he should react. Pretend he was _Moon_ Kyunghoon? Feign memory loss? Hurl the box of spicy fried chicken at Heechul's face and run away? 

Hence, he was totally taken aback when Heechul said, "Do you want to come in and play League of Legends with me?"

It had been years since Kyunghoon had to have some semblance of a friendly interaction with someone who wasn't family, ex-member, or co-worker that he no longer knew the niceties of refusing an invitation courteously, and so he found himself being ushered through the door and into Heechul's living room, which was big, almost too big for what appeared to be only one person and his pets. Kyunghoon's entire apartment could fit inside Heechul's living room. Kyunghoon nervously eyed the Russian blue lounging on the other end of the sofa, and gingerly sat down on the corner closest to the nearest exit.

Heechul wanted to...........get to know him better. With a League of Legends game. Kyunghoon was incredulous, disbelieving—was this a thing idols did, play games with strangers they had sex with?—but also he rarely got a chance to sit in front of a computer and immerse himself in a digital world for hours, oh god did he miss the curve of a mouse under his hand and the _tak-a-tak_ of a clackety mechanical keyboard, and it was a no-brainer, saying yes, and Heechul's smile was as bright as the LED lights that decorated his fancy gaming rig for two.

He had only started to pick up the mechanics of LoL from Junki, but he was a quick study, and soon he was almost managing to beat Heechul who's like _how are you so good at this_ and Kyunghoon's smug ass went, _I spent six months blood-ticketing Shinhwa concerts for pay, I am an expert at fast-clicking._

Nothing like a LAN party for two to create a bond!! A shaky, strained bond, but a bond nonetheless. Here's the thing: Kyunghoon didn't have a lot of same-age friends. Heechul was a year older, a hyung, but there was something about him that made Kyunghoon feel lighter, buoyed up from the bottom of the ocean where he thought he'd sunk like jetsam. 

For a pretty dude, Heechul had a cackling laugh, which helped melt away some of Kyunghoon's self-conscious reserve. Not once did he touch upon their, uh, ill-advised spontaneous sexual encounter. It was like he'd forgotten that Kyunghoon gave him a blowjob. Which was good! Great! No need to do a rehash! (Although, Kyunghoon being Kyunghoon, he was slightly offended that Heechul appeared to not have remembered how their first meeting went, because fuck him, that was a competent blowjob attempt by an amateur. He even swallowed!!)

During a heated moment, Heechul joked about Kyunghoon's head voice. They made eye contact, Heechul turning such an unflattering shade of white, before Kyunghoon put him out of his misery and laughed, because the joke had been funny. The effect on Heechul was remarkable: his face pinkened, and he lit up, as though he'd won a music show or a Daesang. 

Friends and family had tiptoed around the drama of Kyunghoon's life, and it was refreshing for Heechul to be so mean to him, cheerfully rampage through his past misdeeds, his nonsense interview answers and forgotten lyrics and atrocious pronunciations, as though they weren't ghosts haunting the edges of his dreams.

Kyunghoon hated ghosts, not least of all because he felt like one.

*

Kyunghoon left Heechul's apartment with Heechul's number in his phone. He wasn't sure how that happened.

*

He got a call from Eun-mi's school, _your daughter's not feeling well, would you be able to pick her up?_ and it's the world's least great timing, he had two hours left on his shift that he couldn't blow off because his supervisor was already making noises about firing delinquent riders, and his parents went on vacation, and his friends were stuck at their own jobs or too far from Seoul. Chewing on the end of his ID lanyard, he scrolled through his phone's contacts and his thumb landed on the entry for "KIM HEECHUL - DO NOT ANSWER". 

No.

No, no, no.

Kyunghoon couldn't.

Kyunghoon could tell his supervisor to fuck off and ride to Eun-mi's school. But he had bills to pay, and work was hard to come by in this economy, and besides, he couldn't take Eun-mi home on his motorcycle.

Kyunghoon could call the school, ask them to keep Eun-mi in the clinic until he could clock off work, but the worry and panic would eat at him, and he wasn't sure he wouldn't fuck up an order or ten, distracted as he was.

Kyunghoon could—

—the call connected.

"Kyunghoon? What's going on?"

"Hyung— I— uh—" Might as well get it over with. "—I need to ask you a favor."

Kyunghoon could hear Heechul's hesitation over the line, but all he said was, "What is it?"

In a mess of stutters and pauses, Kyunghoon explained the situation to Heechul, summing everything up with a hurried, "and you're a very busy person and we don't know each other and I'm going to go now and sorry for wasting your time—"

"I'm free," Heechul interrupted his grovelling. "I've got nothing to do for the next few hours." The line went muffled, as if Heechul had covered the mouthpiece. "Nothing at all, got it?"

Kyunghoon didn't even want to know.

"Tell your kid—Eun-mi, right?—tell her school that a, a friend of her dad's picking her up— hang on, I'll send a selca that you can forward to her teacher—" Frankly, Kyunghoon was stunned at how decisively Heechul was handling the situation, and could only go _uh-huh_ , _I will_ , _no problem_ into the line.

Heechul's voice softened. "Hey. It'll be alright. I'll take care of your Eun-mi. Just come back to her safe."

"Thank you," said Kyunghoon, swallowing past the sudden lump in his throat.

As Heechul commanded, Kyunghoon made arrangements with Eun-mi's school. Nobody commented about how Eun-mi would be picked up by a real live celebrity.

"But where will we go while you're not home, papa?" Eun-mi asked. Kyunghoon winced at her sniffles, and also for blanking out on this important logistical issue. Making Heechul sit in a van with a sick kid while they wait for Kyunghoon to wrap up work was a big ask to pile on top of an already enormous ask.

Before he could think about it, he sent Heechul his apartment's door code.

It was a stroke of luck that his last destination for the day was near his neighborhood. Once he clocked out, he headed straight home. There was a shiny black van—an obvious celebrity's nanny car—idling in front of Kyunghoon's building. 

As he entered his apartment, he was greeted by Heechul, sat upon Kyunghoon's sagging sofa. It was a mind-bending reversal of their last meeting. Glossy, handsome men like Heechul didn't fit in with water-stained walls and secondhand furniture any more than Kyunghoon did with floor-to-ceiling windows and antiseptic kitchens.

He rushed through the proper greetings, then at Heechul's gesture, made a bee-line for Eun-mi's bedroom. She was curled up underneath her covers, pink with fever, but she was breathing well, and barely stirred when he ran his hand through her sweat-damp fringe.

"The school nurse told me she took some medicine, I put the paper on your counter, she'll be sleeping for another six hours," Heechul said from behind him.

"Thank you," Kyunghoon said, fussing with the blanket. Now that Heechul was here, Kyunghoon was having a hard time facing him. "I apologize for all the trouble we put you through."

"Hey. It's fine. I told you, I wasn't busy. My manager was the one to carry her up from the car to her room."

Kyunghoon jerked his chin in a tight nod. It galled him to appear so helpless, but he'd long ago abandoned the last vestiges of his pride to keep Eun-mi safe, and happy, and healthy.

With a final kiss to Eun-mi's forehead, he stood up and tried to smile at Heechul. "May I offer you a drink?" he asked.

They adjourned to the sofa with glasses of water, Kyunghoon having nothing stronger in his house than Eun-mi's favorite fruit juices. Kyunghoon tried to apologize again for the burden he imposed on Heechul, but Heechul was having none of it.

"This is the first time I've seen your kid, you know."

"Sorry," Kyunghoon said, at a loss for anything else to say. He usually couldn't shut up about Eun-mi, would show off her photos at a drop of a hat, but Heechul—didn't seem the type to be interested?

He said as much to Heechul and Heechul went all cagey and offended, yeah, but she's _your_ kid, Kyunghoon, as if that should meaning something. 

*

"She looks like her mother," Heechul observed. He must have poked through the picture frames scattered around the apartment while waiting for Kyunghoon.

"Good," Kyunghoon replied firmly. "I was an ugly child."

*

Heechul left Kyunghoon's apartment with a promise to come back soon for dinner, to be properly introduced to Eun-mi and to see for himself that she would recover from her illness.

If this were anyone else, Kyunghoon wouldn't think too much of the promise, but he was rapidly starting to understand that when it came to Heechul, Kyunghoon couldn't predict anything.

*

"Are you a prince?" Eun-mi asked Heechul when he showed up at their apartment properly, for the promised dinner. (Kyunghoon refused to think about how much time he spent in the intervening week practicing recipes at his parents' house, even going so far as to search "Kim Heechul favorite food" on Naver.)

Personally, Kyunghoon thought Heechul looked either like a high-fashion gangster or a Psy cosplayer, but he refrained from voicing his observations out loud for fear of Eun-mi asking him what he meant by "gangster" and "cosplay".

"No, I'm the star of the universe," Heechul told her with a straight face, thus earning her undying adoration.

Oddly, Heechul's visits to Kyunghoon and Eun-mi didn't. Stop. He kept showing up, Kyunghoon kept letting him in, and eventually everybody got used to the occasional dinner guest who preferred cold food and knew the entire discography of Sechskies and at least ten girl groups Kyunghoon couldn't pick out of a line-up. When Sunghee dropped by the apartment and was introduced to Heechul, the looks on both his and Heechul's faces were priceless.

Eun-mi was fascinated with Heechul; Kyunghoon thought it might have something to do with how colorful Heechul was, in contrast to the grim half-life she'd had to grow up with. Heechul always had a splash of color: a red hoodie, pink shoes, checkered pants, a flowery cap. Even his hair got in on the action sometimes, prompting Eun-mi to tug at Kyunghoon's hair and ask why her papa's hair wasn't magic like her flower uncle.

"It's because I'm the star of the universe," Heechul told Eun-mi, then mouthed at Kyunghoon, _flower uncle?_ Kyunghoon lifted his shoulders. Eun-mi had grown up exposed to Kyunghoon's awful habit of describing people when he couldn't remember their names. As such, when Kyunghoon introduced her to his ex-members, zen-like Yejun became "stone uncle", bearded Woohyun "fuzzy uncle", tattooed Junki "comics uncle", and taller-than-papa Sunghee "tower uncle". "Flower uncle" suited Heechul well enough.

*

Kyunghoon was adamant about Heechul not showering Eun-mi with gifts, but little trinkets kept turning up in and around the apartment: pocket-sized plushies of her favorite characters, glittery stickers on her notebooks, a blue stationery set that he suspected was limited edition Super Junior fan goods.

He should have been more strict about the no-gift policy, because give Heechul a note and he'd sing the entire song (probably imitating Jo Sung Moo to boot), and also, Yejun said something about certain kinds of relationships he shouldn't enter into even though the money was good for handsome, needy guys. But Eun-mi was so gleeful, not so much at the presents themselves, but for Heechul remembering her, that he couldn't bear to tell Heechul to stop.

As Kyunghoon prepared dinner or folded laundry or organized Eun-mi's room or watered the houseplants, Heechul guided Eun-mi through girl group dances in the living room. The two of them even sang along, Heechul slipping into an impersonation here and there of singers Eun-mi hadn't even heard of, but would make Kyunghoon laugh every time. 

*

He was over at Heechul's for LoL, which turned into dinner, which turned into drinks, which turned into them lying down on the carpet, admiring the non-existent patterns on Heechul's ceiling, Heechul muttering darkly about how his leg won't forgive him in the morning. Kyunghoon let Heebum curl up on his chest and giggled at nothing in particular.

Maybe it was the alcohol, or the company, or Heebum's purring; whatever it was, Kyunghoon felt compelled to hum a snatch of song he'd picked up at the supermarket.

Heechul perked up. "I know that one. [Endless. Flower. Released in 2000](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l01qxOgW7iY)."

 _how does he know these things,_ Kyunghoon marveled inwardly, but Heechul wasn't done speaking.

"The entire time we've been seeing each other, and this is the first song I hear you sing. We could have gone to a noraebang or something!"

Frankly, Kyunghoon broke out in a cold sweat even at the thought. "Isn't that not surprising? Singing's not my job. Why would you even want to hear me sing?"

"People miss your music more than you think they do."

"Buzz is never reuniting." He was sure of that. The idea of a reunion was a burdensome curse he and his hyungs agreed to never speak of. Besides, they had their own lives, careers inside music and out of it, more stable and fulfilling than vague possibilities of reviving a dead horse of a band. For his own part, Kyunghoon knew, bone-deep, that he would never stand under a spotlight and be left unscathed.

"That's not what I mea—" Heechul sat up on his elbows, reaching over to poke him hard on the shoulder. Heebum mewled at Kyunghoon's flinch. "I asked Eun-mi, as a joke, to rank your singing compared to Woohyun-ssi. She said her fuzzy uncle was pretty bad, but she didn't know if you could sing because you only mumble along to lullabies."

Pursing his lips, Kyunghoon focused on petting Heebum back to sleep. He didn't want to tell Heechul he couldn't bear to raise his voice even in _church_ , to the God of his faith, where songs were a matter of grace, not talent.

"When I listened to your albums, I used to want to steal your voice and sing all your songs in your voice, but also have you listen to me sing and tell me that I sang so well in your voice."

"What?" Kyunghoon was so surprised he nearly disturbed Heebum's cat-nap. "You don't need to, like, steal my voice or whatever. You're a really good singer yourself."

Kyunghoon had never noticed just how big Heechul's eyes could get. Oh, right. Heechul didn't like compliments.

"I know I sing well," Heechul conceded with the grace of a grumpy cat, "but there was a time, a long time—I thought everybody knew this, jeez, Kyunghoon, you're really making me say this—there was a time when I refused to sing. Like, 'nearly quit Super Junior' refused to sing. A bad stage performance, then criticism online, you know how it goes. I hated making mistakes, and I thought, maybe if I stopped singing, I wouldn't make mistakes anymore. It took me until TRAX Jungmo and 'Evanesce' to forgive myself for being human. Then I kicked myself for wasting all that time not doing what I loved the most."

They were silent for long minutes. It was not, precisely, an uncomfortable silence. "I don't even know why I'm telling you this," said Heechul eventually.

The reason was obvious to Kyunghoon: "Because it doesn't matter if you tell me anything." He wasn't an MC or a DJ or a journalist—he was just a nobody, a dead-end for the secrets Heechul kept from the world.

Heechul shook his head, an emphatic denial. "It matters. _You_ matter. You lived through this shit too. That counts for a lot."

"Yeah, but—" Kyunghoon never went through the rigors of training. He never lived in a dorm with other trainees. He never had to go through the agony of failing to debut, or being found inadequate by a company. All his members ever did was make him theirs, make him a part of Buzz, place him behind a mic and told him to sing.

Kyunghoon bet the agency regretted their carelessness.

"Look, I'm not that guy anymore." He thought it over. "I don't think I was ever that guy."

"What, a rockstar?" And Heechul was completely serious, which was the only thing that stopped Kyunghoon from laughing scornfully. Shin Hae-chul was a rockstar. Yoon Do Hyun was a rockstar. Kim Kyung-ho was a rockstar. Go Yoo-jin was a rockstar. Min Kyunghoon, as certain seniors had snidely remarked at festivals when they thought he was out of earshot, was most emphatically not.

Kyunghoon's sound logic did not impress Heechul. "What do they know? Doing everything for love is pure rock. It is rock-and-roll as fuck. Right up there with destroying guitars at Woodstock and going up to eleven. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise."

*

At a picnic in Woohyun's backyard with his hyungs and their significant others, Kyunghoon noticed the guitar bag on Sunghee's back. "I had the strings replaced," Sunghee explained and propped it against the table, seemingly content to leave it there for the day.

Kyunghoon kept looking at it. He hadn't gone near a musical instrument since Eun-mi was born.

The sun was dipping down below the horizon: the golden hour. Everyone was awash in the soft light, pleasantly full of conversation and barbecue and decent whiskey Woohyun and Jinyi brought back from their honeymoon. Kyunghoon was so relaxed that when Yejun talked Sunghee into playing some mood music, he didn't hesitate to join in the beseeching chorus. Laughing, Sunghee obliged, strumming idly, transitioning in and out of familiar melodies as the mood, and everybody's murmured requests, took him.

At some point, guided perhaps by years of practice, Sunghee tentatively picked out the opening chords of a song that they recognized all too well. Buzz had been haphazardly promoting 'My Love (And)' when their career went to shit. He glanced at Kyunghoon. The others fell silent.

What was it Heechul had said? _It took me until TRAX Jungmo and 'Evanesce' to forgive myself for being human. Then I kicked myself for wasting all that time not doing what I loved the most._

He breathed in deeply. 

The lyrics of the song took a moment to float up from the misty outer reaches of his memories, but as soon as they came, he started singing. Easy like Sunday morning.

 _It matters._ You _matter_. 

It didn't hurt, not at all.

 _a good memory,_ Junki sent that night, along with [a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm1__3PgT0M) of his and Sunghee's impromptu jam session.

He couldn't recognize the smiling man on-screen, ruddy-cheeked from soju and the strain of singing after a decade of enforced silence. The vocals were nothing compared to the heights he used to be able to reach, but the sound of his own voice brought tears to his eyes no stadium performance ever provoked.

Before he could be besieged with second thoughts, he forwarded the clip to Heechul on Kakaotalk.

Heechul sent back seven blue heart emojis and a compliment for the Sunghee-Kyunghoon duo. But he didn't bring it up the next time they met in person, as though he knew that this was still a sensitive tender wound forbidden to touch. Heechul was strangely good at intuiting those kinds of things.

*

Of course, Heechul had a life outside entertaining Kyunghoon's kid and eating Kyunghoon's food, and for nearly a month, Kyunghoon and Eun-mi barely saw him. Because Eun-mi had her mother's even-keeled temperament, once Kyunghoon and Heechul explained to her that her flower uncle would visit again when his job would let him, she simply extracted a promise that Heechul would teach her more dances and bid him a cheerful farewell.

Kyunghoon wished he could say the same for himself. Junki kept kept hiding his face in his hands whenever Kyunghoon commandeered his Instagram account to watch Heechul's rare, whatchamacallit, IG stories?

He just wanted to make sure that Heechul was taking care of himself. There wasn't anything wrong with that, right?

*

Midnight. Kyunghoon was still up, carefully balancing the family account when he heard the doorbell.

It was Heechul, in a rumpled tracksuit, cap low on his forehead, reeking of stale air, every detail pointing him just arriving from the airport. Pushing aside the warm glow this conclusion lit in his chest, Kyunghoon gently shepherded him through the darkened apartment.

"Hyung, didn't I give you the door code?" he couldn't help but point out, "you could've just gone inside."

Heechul wasn't fatigued enough to not look horrified at the suggestion. Sometimes Kyunghoon forgot that Heechul was incredibly sensitive about privacy.

Luckily, Kyunghoon had made his bed and made a herculean effort to pick his dirty socks up from the floor earlier that morning. He told Heechul, "You can stay here," and made to retreat to the living room couch, except for Heechul's hand on his wrist. _Where are you going?_ he asked, voice blurry with exhausted confusion, and when Kyunghoon explained, he shook his head, adamant. _No, we can share._

"No, we can't," Kyunghoon said. "No, _hyung_."

Ten minutes later, Kyunghoon learned that his twin bed was a tight fit for two grown men. Nonetheless, he didn't feel uncomfortable at all, and from the way he immediately dropped off to sleep as soon as he laid his head on the pillow, Heechul didn't either.

Kyunghoon resisted the urge to touch his face, drew up the blanket over them both, and closed his eyes, lulled into darkness by Heechul's sheep-like breathing. He'd sorely missed sleeping with another person in his arms.

In the morning, Heechul was still there, an unconscious weight at Kyunghoon's back. Kyunghoon could hear Eun-mi's footsteps outside his room and was glad he thought to lock the bedroom door last night.

Hoarding the memory of Heechul's slack, peaceful face, Kyunghoon reluctantly got out of bed, and padded to the kitchen, where Eun-mi was picking through a bag of fruit Yejun had dropped off.

"Is flower uncle here?" she asked him. She must have seen Heechul's shoes in the hyeon gwan.

"Yes," Kyunghoon replied. He opened the refrigerator and contemplated its contents. His mom had been texting him again about not missing breakfast for himself. "But he's tired because he just got back to the city on a plane," he looked over his shoulder and mock-seriously put his index finger to his lips, "so let's be quiet while he sleeps, okay?"

She nodded, and made him promise that when Heechul woke up, she would be allowed to tell him all of her adventures he missed when he was away.

"—which is why you'll be treated to a full production when Eun-mi gets home from school," Kyunghoon told Heechul wryly over lunch. Not wanting Heechul to wake up in an empty apartment, Kyunghoon had called in sick at work.

Heechul looked bewildered. "Seriously? I don't know much about kids, but I thought they had short attention spans. Didn't know Eun-mi would look for me."

Admittedly, Eun-mi used to have trouble grasping object permanence when she was a baby. Regardless—"Are you kidding me, hyung? Don't you know how much she misses you? She looks for you all the time. We see your face on ads on the subway and she asks me when you'll visit again."

To his mounting horror, he realized he wasn't talking about Eun-mi anymore. Kyunghoon closed his mouth with an audible snap, wishing for the ground to swallow him whole, frantically casting about for something to wipe the puzzled, wondering brightness in Heechul's eyes—"Massage?"

"excuse me?"

He used to do it for Yejun, smoothing down the aches of a day's worth of drumming from his shoulders, but back then, Kyunghoon could only stay in one place for five minutes before he inevitably got bored and wandered away to roughhouse with Sunghee or Junki.

Also, he never straddled Yejun on his bed in the middle of the day and placed his hands all over his bare calves.

 _This is platonic!! 100% totally platonic!!_ Kyunghoon mentally shouted at his dick. He ignored the voice in his head: 1) suggesting that orgasms, platonic or otherwise, were a good analgesic and, 2) helpfully observing that Heechul's cock was conveniently within sucking distance. 

Besides, from how Heechul's body was melting into the mattress with every sweep of Kyunghoon's hands over his leg, the massage was working as intended, even sans blowjob.

 _You must have heard this a thousand times, every day in every way, but you are so lovely to me,_ he thought, wistful. 

Kyunghoon had taught himself to set aside his desires, pretend that they belonged to another person entirely, to a man who was free to do what he wanted, unbound by the chains of obligations and his crippling fears.

Having Heechul in his arms made him want to be that man so badly.

Kyunghoon looked down at Heechul's face, his eyes tracing the arch of his cheekbones and the bow of his lips. _I wish I had met you sooner. I wish I were the man you think I am. I wish I could keep you._

Bending his head, careful to keep his weight off Heechul, Kyunghoon leaned forward to press a kiss to Heechul's mouth.

"Finally," Heechul said, and pulled him closer.

*

"I thought you'd forgotten about our thing in the bathroom."

"How, how could I forget? I had your cock in my mouth. You think I won't remember that?"

"You didn't remember who I was!"

"What—that's unfair, do you remember every single celebrity that you meet?"

"Yes, when they're introduced to me, like you were, ten years ago. You had all this hair and a leather harness on—"

That day, Kyunghoon found out that a great way to shut Kim Heechul up was to sit in his lap and kiss him until Eun-mi came home from school.

*

It was great, for a little while. Kyunghoon should have known better than to be complacent.

*

Heechul started disappearing on him, and it wasn't like before, when Heechul was mired in work or had to leave the city for schedules but always had time for a text or a selca or even to drop by Kyunghoon's apartment on his way to the airport. Now he was cutting short their dates, leaving dinner abruptly, always whispering on his phone, distracted and mind obviously elsewhere even if his body was right in front of Kyunghoon.

He tried asking Heechul, but Heechul brushed him off, far away, abstracted, and for the first time, Kyunghoon felt the yawning distance between the two of them.

Eun-mi asked him, "is flower uncle coming back?" and Kyunghoon didn't have an answer. 

He wasn't given to jealousy, had faith in the faithfulness of devotion, but what if, what if this was Heechul, letting go before he could be entangled any further in the quagmire of Kyunghoon's life—

What could Kyunghoon offer, except for mediocre home-cooked kimchi fried rice, a challenge in LoL, and too much baggage for Heechul's future? Dating for idols was hard enough as it was, but to date a single dad who'd already fucked up once was career suicide.

When he asked Eun-ji to marry him, he knew that he'd placed a terrible burden on her: to be the girl Min Kyunghoon gave everything up for. He was halfway prepared for her to refuse, and his tears when she said yes were mingled joy and a shapeless sorrow. Kyunghoon, at 22, was greedy, wanting to keep Eun-ji as his and only his. He hadn't been that good of a person to selflessly let her go. 

And all she got in return was vicious comments online and offline, snide remarks about her looks and her gold-digging and her unworthiness to be Kyunghoon's wife, and mobs with hateful signs, and even an online petition to get her fired from her job. And then—she winded up with a divorce, and a child she had to co-parent from the other side of the world, and a useless ex-husband who sent her self-pitying messages while she was at work; light years away from the fairy tale ending Kyunghoon had promised her.

Improbably, she still cared for him despite everything.

He feared that, unlike her, he would be weak, resentful, of Heechul's overwhelming life outside the cozy bubble of Kyunghoon's apartment. He neither had Eun-ji's strength nor the grace that Eun-mi inherited from her, and soon, being with Heechul would require a sacrifice that Kyunghoon—still selfish, still self-centered, still a creature of comfort and habit and of inertia—couldn't make.

Hell, Kyunghoon didn't even know if Heechul would give anything up for him. 

Junki said, _don't think like that,_ and Woohyun said, _he must have a good explanation,_ and Yejun said, _ask him again,_ and Sunghee said, _you deserve more,_ and Eun-ji said, _I'll kick his ass_ ; and it was nice, having people on his corner again, but he didn't bother pointing out the obvious: Heechul had been a fan, and Kyunghoon had firsthand experience of how capricious a fan's love could be. 

Heechul told Kyunghoon nothing. Unfortunately, Kyunghoon had years of experience at making _something_ out of nothing.

*

One day, Kyunghoon woke up and his phone battery was dead. Curious, he plugged in the charger, and when his phone turned on, the screen was flooded with texts and missed calls and e-mails that seemed to have come in during the night. He skimmed the notifications, bemused, then randomly picked one text to open. 

It was a link to an article.

The photo caught his eye first. It was a paparazzi shot of Heechul in front of his apartment complex, standing on the sidewalk next to a horribly familiar motorcycle and an even more horribly familiar figure—Kyunghoon himself. He was half-turned away from the camera, but with his helmet under one arm and his face mask pulled down under his chin, his profile was visible. He could be mistaken for any generically tall guy in his thirties, except the website had helpfully inset a photo of a much younger Kyunghoon, taken after what had ended up being Buzz's last concert, days before their agency issued its ultimatum about Eun-mi. 

The screen blurred in front of his eyes, and he could only pick out _Super Junior Heechul_ , _disbanded_ , _divorced_ , _rumors_ and _the nature of their relationship is unknown_. The article was carefully crafted to be ostensibly neutral, but a vicious malice permeated every word.

 _Some of those texts must be telling me not to read the comments,_ Kyunghoon thought, even as he scrolled down to the comments section.

> [+527, -69] why are there articles about useless non-news like this?? who cares about this has-been
> 
> [+416, -59] no band, no looks, no wife kekekekekekekeke
> 
> [+351, -51] kim heechul surrounds himself with ungrateful selfish fake idols and unfaithful divorced guys, no wonder he's trash
> 
> [+34, -6] wasn't min kyunghoon the reason why his band broke up? if he threatens super junior i'm not responsible for what i'll do
> 
> [+31, -3] as usual sm artists associating themselves with the worst of the industry
> 
> [+30, -4] guess we know why m*k is divorced
> 
> [+27, -7] min kyunghoon was a wannabe rockstar with no talent. kim heechul is a wannabe rockstar with no talent. it's a match made in heaven!

With numb fingers, he returned to the home screen and navigated to the phone app. Pressed on Heechul's name.

Heechul's ringback tone had changed.

_Sorry, the person you are calling is busy at the moment. Please try again later._

Again.

What was this song? It was Heechul's voice, but Kyunghoon couldn't place the name of it.

_Sorry, the person you are calling is busy at the moment. Please try again later._

Again.

The title of Heechul's ringback tone would go on the list of questions Kyunghoon wanted Heechul to answer. It was getting to be a long list.

_Sorry, the person you are calling is busy at the moment. Please try again later._

Again.

At least they spared his kid. There was no mention of Eun-mi in the entire article. Even the comments skirted around her existence.

_Sorry, the person you are calling is busy at the moment. Please try again later._

Again.

_Sorry, the person you are calling is busy at the moment. Please try again later._

Again.

_Sorry, the person you are calling is busy at the moment. Please try again later._

Again.

_Sorry, the person you are calling is busy at the moment. Please try again later._

Again.

_Sorry, the person you are calling is busy at the moment. Please try again later._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i swear this has a happy ending
> 
> the original quote was _I wanna kill you and wear your skin like a dress / But then also have you see me in the dress / And be like, "O-M-G you look so cute in my skin!"_ from [rachel bloom - feelin' kinda naughty](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaYug9IZDz8)
> 
> more promo time: [sign-ups for the heechul/kyunghoon exchange close on nov. 15 (23:59 UTC)!](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/kyungchulexchange2018/profile)


End file.
